A Commitment to Beauty
by Barbara McCandless
About the Author
- Barbara McCandless is Curator of Photographic Collections
at the Amon Carter Museum. She is author of Equal Before the Lens: Jno.
Trlica's Photographs of Granger, Texas (1992). She is the coauthor
of books including Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (1991),
New York to Hollywood: The Photography of Karl Struss (1995), An
American Collection: Works from the Amon Carter Museum (2001), and
Singular Moments: Photographs from the Amon Carter Museum.
Amon Carter Museum's Photography Collection
The Amon Carter Museum holds one of the country's major
collections of American photography and has held numerous exhibitions on
the subject. For a description of the collection please see the Museum's
Photography
web page which describes Struss, among other key photographers in collection,
as follows:
- Karl Struss (1886-1981), one of the leading pictorial
photographers of the pre-World War I era, is represented in the collection
with 300 prints and 5,000 negatives. His reputation was established when
Alfred Stieglitz selected his work for the 1910 International Exhibition
of Pictorial Photography and then published a portfolio in Camera Work
in 1912. In 1909 Struss invented the Struss Pictorial Lens, a soft-focus
lens that proved immensely popular with other photographers of the period,
including Laura Gilpin. After studying with Clarence White, Struss took
over his studio in 1914 and specialized in portraiture, advertising, and
magazine illustration. Five years later he moved to Hollywood and became
Cecil B. DeMille's still-cameraman. Struss soon turned from still photography
to cinematography, filming such works as Ben Hur (1925) and Sunrise
(1927), for which he received the first Academy Award for cinematography.
Resource Library editor's
note:
This essay was rekeyed and reprinted on February 15, 2005
in Resource Library with permission of the Amon Carter Museum. The
essay, 
written in 1995, was excerpted
from the 256 page illustrated catalogue for the exhibition New York to
Hollywood: Photographs by Karl Struss, (ISBN #0826316387) held at the
Amon Carter Museum. The book was co-published by the Amon Carter Museum
and the University of New Mexico Press. Images accompanying the text in
the exhibition catalogue were not reproduced with this reprinting. (right:
front cover of New York to Hollywood: Photographs by Karl Struss.
Courtesy of Amazon.com.)
Amazon.com's editorial review provides this description
of the book:
- Struss (1886-1981) was that rara avis who mastered both
still photography and cinematography. Best known for his stunning camera
work on F.W. Murnau's Sunrise -- for which he shared the first Academy
Award for cinematography in 1927 -- Struss was a member of Photo-Secession,
an organization co-founded by Alfred Stieglitz devoted to the promotion
of photography as a fine art. While Koszarski discusses Struss' contributions
to the cinema, the focus of this retrospective is the artist's earlier
New York pictorial work; the book is handsomely illustrated with black
and white images from Struss' oeuvre, as well as his striking 1910-17 experiments
in color.
-
Resource Library wishes to
extend appreciation to Mariam Hermann and Paula Stewart of the Amon Carter
Museum for their help concerning permissions for reprinting the above text
Readers may also enjoy photos of Lucerne
provided by a TFAO volunteer.
If you have questions or comments regarding the essay,
or if you have interest in obtaining a copy of the exhibition catalogue,
please contact Amon Carter Museum through either this phone number or web
address:
-
Go to:
Read more articles and essays concerning this institutional
source by visiting the sub-index page for the Amon
Carter Museum in Resource Library.
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